Yeltsin celebrates 75th birthday still despised in Russia

By SABRA AYRES, COX NEWS SERVICE

Published 10:00 pm, Tuesday, January 31, 2006

MOSCOW -- It's been nearly 15 years since Boris Yeltsin stood on a Soviet tank outside the Russian parliament, envisioned a democratic Russia and incited hope abroad that he would be the man to turn his country around.

Tuesday, as Yeltsin celebrates his 75th birthday, the white-haired man who went on to become Russia's first popularly elected president is more despised than revered. His birthday festivities today will include an official visit to the Kremlin to meet with President Vladimir Putin. Former President Clinton, who reportedly formed a strong friendship with Yeltsin while in office, also will join him for the celebration.

But outside of the Kremlin, few ordinary Russians will join in the well-wishing.

Though the West sees Yeltsin as a champion of post-Soviet democracy, most Russians blame him for the economic and social decline, corruption and so-called gangster capitalism of the 1990s.

Where the West remembers a jovial -- if often drunk -- political reformer and tennis fan, Russians wince at what they say was disgraceful behavior from a Kremlin leader.

It was Yeltsin and his team of oligarchs and reformers who robbed the country of valuable assets by selling off key industries at cheap prices to friends and family, many Russians say. They blame his economic reformers for forcing more than 80 percent of the population into poverty overnight, while friends of the Kremlin became very rich.

In a survey taken by the Levada Center polling agency late last year, only 2 percent of those surveyed said they viewed Yeltsin in a positive light. Seventy percent said they believed history would judge Yeltsin negatively.

"It's better not to remember Yeltsin, because it reminds us of such a bad time in our lives," said Maria, 61, a Muscovite who declined to give her last name. "I now live on a pension of less than $85 a month. This is the work of Yeltsin's team."

Only Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader and father of perestroika (economic reform), has lower poll ratings, thanks to accusations by many Russians that he was the mastermind behind the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The Russian public points approvingly to Putin, a stern former KGB officer with sky-high popularity. Now in his second term, his elevated standing is widely believed to be a result of being "anti-Yeltsin" -- strong, disciplined and sober.

Putin is credited with bringing stability and economic prosperity back to Russia, despite Western criticism of his autocratic rule.

Western governments, including the United States, say that Putin has backtracked on democracy by controlling the media, regulating civil society and doing away with the popular election of regional governors.

"If you look at opinion polls, only a minority believe he gave Russians freedom, opportunity to get success and freedom of traveling," said Boris Nemtsov, a political consultant and former deputy prime minister under Yeltsin.

"But Yeltsin's real problem is that his successor doesn't believe in all of these things. He is completely on the opposite side of the political spectrum from Yeltsin. This is a real tragedy for Yeltsin, I believe."

Ironically, it was Yeltsin who handpicked Putin from obscurity to become his prime minister and then named him acting president on New Year's Eve in 1999, when the ailing Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned in a televised address. Six months later, Putin was elected to his first term, and Yeltsin went quietly into retirement in one of the elite suburbs on the outskirts of Moscow.

Putin was quick to distance himself from Yeltsin, whose approval ratings had fallen to as low as 5 percent in the months before his resignation.

Many believe Putin made a pact with Yeltsin in which the Kremlin agreed to ignore accusations of illegal activities against Yeltsin and his family as long as Yeltsin kept quietly in the background.

"After Putin came to power, attitudes to the Yeltsin era deteriorated noticeably," said Leonid Sedov, an analyst at the Levada Center. "In Russia, every new administration tries to discredit the previous administration in some way."

For the past six years, Yeltsin has remained mostly out of the public arena. When he appears on state-run television, it's usually as a fan at a tennis match.

"Whether we like Yeltsin or not, he is a part of Russian history, and if we don't keep some memories, in 15 years we may lose most of it because it will be lost in the layers of new information that nowadays has moved over us with fast speed," said Sergey Skrobov, founder of a small museum dedicated to Yeltsin in the Urals State Polytechnic University in Yekaterinburg.

Two weeks after the museum opened its small exhibit, the university administration asked Skrobov to shut it down. Local authorities were afraid it would be seen as disloyal to Putin, Skrobov said.